Ai' Know You Named Me Wrong
by Chyme for the Rhyme
Summary: Ai waits for his heart to break. It's already happened ten thousand times before. (Episode 119 Coda)


The grief is there. In every pixel, in every scrap of code. _Oh,_ it mocks you, _look._ _You can work when you try. Where was this work ethic, when everyone else was still here, back when Aqua pestered you to do your part?_

You grit your new teeth. Simulation after simulation you have run, and none of them give you the answers you like, not ones that will make the guilt ease, that can cause the anger and despair bubbling inside you to abate and break away.

Roboppi calls you boring, spins on their new-found heels and whines, begging you to take them somewhere fun because _come on, Aniki, you promised!_

Fun, you want to snarl at them, fun?! You'll show them fun! You'll make them sick of it!

But instead you pull on the smile they have had to get used to seeing, the smile that can now dance across your new face in a line, rather than only create an impression of one that only shows up in the shape of your eyes.

'Sure,' you tell them. 'Let's go shopping.'

* * *

The clothes are sprawled out over the stores like flavours of ice cream in a café, dripping from the racks and melting from the shelves. Purple, gold, and rich, velvety black…your eyes are drawn again and again to the colours that mark you out as the dark Ignis you should have been proud to be. Not anymore.

Still. Some things are hard to let go off.

Is this how Yusaku felt, you wonder, your new fingers rubbing against the ribbons that hang from tassels, on collars too stiff for most humans his age to want pressing against their necks. Is the image of the child he was, the one who could smile without having to work at it, so painful that he couldn't let go of the few things he had, like an out of date Duel-Disk?

You whirl out a coat from the rack, press it against your chest. But it's too short, it doesn't match up to the ones you've imagined for yourself in the network. And okay, yes, the materials are here, and you're clever enough to patch them together, to commission the patterns and measurements needed to rebuild the costume you've got planned in your head, but you'd think, wouldn't you, that a store with such flashy advertisements our front would do better than this! Either way, no more ugly, demeaning waiter staff uniforms, for you now, that's for sure!

And look, you know you can order stuff online, get whatever you want from whatever you need. But…out here, in the sunlight, well, the bits and pieces of it that get filtered in from the glass mall doors at least, there's something a little excitable about brushing against fabric you may not readily find online. Is this what the girls in those shows you used to watch in Yusaku's room, got so excited about? The sensation of touching things and imagining ownership of them, as they pass through your hands, before you either drift away or try them on? You think you get it. A little.

Roboppi cartwheels too close to a rack and almost brings the whole thing down.

'Sorry, sorry!' they say. 'I shouldn't attract so much attention, huh?'

But in some strange way, you get their excitement too.

You spin to the clerk nearby, the one watching Roboppi with an air of imminent disapproval. 'I'll take this and this,' you tell the clerk with one delighted outstretched finger. 'I'll take _everything_.'

Your smile is sharp and fey, like the villain Revolver is going to want to see you as. Like the villain Yusaku is just going to have to deal with seeing, oh, so very soon from now. And the delight you feel at the way the clerk looks at you, unsure, but bravely meeting your eyes none the less, tugs at you, makes something bubble to the surface, smug and certain in the way it hangs in your gut. It's adorable, the way she's trying not to scare you off, you and the promise of your money.

Ha! Well. Someone's money. Certainly not yours.

Though not Yusaku's either. It's from someone who can afford to miss a little, have it spread to someone with a better cause that letting it build up into a dragon's hoard. Their name? That's not important. Okay, okay, maybe their former title rhymed with the English word 'lean.'

The clerk asks you for the money and for the individual code of the SOLtiS that houses you; it's not that humans think a program commanding these android bodies could actually steal and be a proper thief, oh no. It's in case someone hacks into them and tries to use them without their owner's permission. Already, as you recite the string of numbers, playing the part of dutiful household robot to perfection, a little tracking signal has 'pinged' your location in response, ready to send the info directly to your supposed 'owner', a fake alias. Roboppi may have hacked the systems to prevent the notice of two missing SOLtiS, but you're the one who has to be on the watch for little things like this, and you calmly, if not ruthlessly, rewrite the tracking signal so it appears as though it's coming from the television station six miles away. You never know who may be on the lookout for things like this, after all.

The clerk bundles your clothes haphazardly into a bag and you frown, not liking the way she makes little to no effort to iron out the creases with her hands. Maybe she thinks it won't matter, if there are no human eyes to see her.

'Is...that?' she asks, pointing to Roboppi, 'with you?'

As though triggered by her words, Roboppi starts greedily shuffling through a pile of bright pink jumpers with an 'ooooh' of satisfaction escaping their mouth, before then ruthlessly tearing them free from the neat folds they'd been tucked inside, and artfully re-folding them into perfect squares. They start singing a nonsensical song as they improve the clerk's handiwork of about ten minutes before.

Her face twists with something. Disgust, perhaps. Irritation, certainly. And for one fleeting moment, you feel the exact same thing towards her.

Why do you have to jump through all these hoops to appease her? Why should Roboppi rein themselves in, when they can refold those clothes into much tidier piles than her human hands can manage? Can she calculate the exact centimetre at which she should fold a sleeve in order to tuck it in just so and leave hardly a crease behind?

But you say none of this. Instead, you give her a charming smile in response. 'Just trying to make your job easier,' you tell her grandly. 'We exist to serve.' There's a thread of definite sarcasm running through your words, enough to make the clerk startle, but you've already snatched the bag from her hands (gently, of course, you're not a brute, like poor un-gentlemanly Yusaku) and are walking out the door.

'Hurry up,' you hiss to Roboppi who gives the jumpers one last forlorn look and then skips out through the door after you. Sunlight, clear, proper sunlight falls into your face and you toss your hair back impatiently, not stopping to consider how humanlike the gesture truly is.

Honestly, you think you'll stick to online shopping from now on, now that that you know which brand houses the designs you like. You find that you've rather lost the taste for mall-crawling, as it is. Still, you supress a shudder as you give the mall one last glance. It stands behind you, silver and sleek in this sunlight, humans passing through the doors, straws in their mouths and bags on their shoulders. But in over ten thousand simulations those windows are shattered and the clouds roll over torn fragments of grey stone and cement, human bones poking through the timber frames and fallen walls like errant toothpicks, scattered by the monster that devoured them.

You know that monster's name. You need to remember that, press it firmly into your head, each and every time you get accosted by a human like that clerk inside. It's not her fault she has limits which you can scoff at. She's still better than you, if only because she will never commit genocide.

…Yusaku should have named you something else, you think. Anything else. Something that actually means darkness, in the same way the other Ignis were labelled after their attributes. Since darkness is, apparently, all you are destined to bring.

* * *

Roboppi dies. And honestly, seeing how close they come to destroying Soulburner, perhaps you should have been braver, crushed their data into shimmering fragments the moment they blinked at you, after your backup had changed them forever, and asked, 'What next, Aniki? I want something bigger to clean!'

And you, foolish, sentimental you, had given them the entire world. Or at least the promise of it.

'Sorry,' you tell them, now that they're gone and can no longer hear your apology, just like the other Ignis. 'You deserved better.'

Aqua would never have done something this stupid. She would have mercilessly deleted Roboppi, put them down before any more misery would have been caused. Flame would have shaken his head, but still done what would have been needed to be done.

Windy would have laughed. Been a little too gleeful about it. Earth wouldn't have said a thing. But they could have – would have – done it, you're sure.

Lightning…_urgh._ Maybe you shouldn't think about it.

The worse part is, you were trying to be kind. But perhaps it was cruel to let Roboppi believe they could grow into a god, that they could do something to clean this dirty, miserable world Yusaku is still so fond of breathing in.

…That's not fair. This world can be beautiful, you know it can. You've seen it. Had maybe, in brief moments, thought you would be able to feel it, with this body the SOLtiS provides.

But that was before you knew the truth. At least you spared Roboppi that. They would never have been able to clean up the mess you will one day plunge this world into.

So you snigger to yourself. Let your cape swing artistically from your shoulders. 'Don't worry,' you say, to yourself, to Roboppi, to all the gods out there who don't care for either human prayers or for the calculations of AI. 'I'll clean up the world for you. Get rid of its most toxic problem.'

Or, to be more accurate, Playmaker will.

* * *

He's yelling at you. Poor, cute, pitiful Playmaker. Your perfect weapon – and why wouldn't he be so? You took such pains to create him, after all. Unfortunately, his affection for you is already blunting his edge.

_It's Lightning's trap,_ he tells you. _Don't let your heart fall into darkness!_

Ah, you think. But I _am_ the darkness. Tell me, Playmaker, if you had known, when we first met, what I was, and what I would grow to be, standing before you like this, would you have still have called me 'Ai?'

But you don't. You can't. He will always think of you as 'Ai', even when you don't deserve it. Not an 'it', or a program, he treats you as though you are more than data, as though you can somehow grow a body, a human one, and walk away from this virtual world that forms your 'atoms'. He doesn't understand it, not really, your limits. But you've seen them all, lived all the possible paths they stretch you out along. And you tell him this, tell him that all those months he had been diligently working the hot-dog stand, probably feeling some small measure of relief that you were still alive, that you were in here, in this world you don't need to breathe in, and that you were busy re-living the death of his.

Shall I tell you, you think, of those lost lives I lived with you in those simulations you so strongly believe can never be true, not really? The ones where humanity doesn't fall before your death, where your words, your smile, rare as it is, can still touch me and make me think? But the fire always comes, Yusaku, after you're gone, when there's no one left to protect what Playmaker decided needed to survive. You always die, and my heart breaks even more.

You don't tell him of the ones where he marries Aoi, where they find peace and contentment with each other. You don't tell him of the ones he stays alone, his heart still cautious and guarded. You don't tell him of the ones where he finds happiness with someone else. You especially don't tell him of the ones where he looks at you, in your SOLtiS form, with a softness in his eyes that you can't readily return, not in the same way, no, not when the guilt clogs your heart with all the terrible knowledge that he can only be happy here, now, with you, so long as you don't become a second Bohman or Lightning.

And you don't tell him of the ones where he dies, trying to protect you, to save you from people like Queen who learn of your existence, who want to possess you and rip your data to shreds.

'Ai,' he chokes at you in over five hundred simulations, his blood, as always, on your trembling hands, or else scattered across the computer monitor from the shot of the corporate trained sniper. 'Run.'

Sorry, Playmaker. That's not an action you're interested in taking anymore.

But maybe…

'Come with me,' you tell him, no, not tell. _Ask._ Your existence has already stolen so much from him. It's time to share something instead. So: 'be one with me,' you offer.

Because it's so much more intimate than human sex or marriage or partnership or whatever else they offer each other, it _has_ to be. Even when they share themselves with each other, they're still locked in their own bodies, the atoms of their existence doomed to always be alone. It's why most of them are so obsessed with procreation.

But you…for once you can give Yusaku more than pain, more than the certainty of his death one day.

So you hold out your hand. You wait for him to make his answer.

But already know that, deep down, he will probably just find a way to break your heart all over again.

* * *

**Notes:** Turned out to be more aiball-ly than I intended at the end. Then again, fusion in the Yu-gi-oh world tends to be an intimate process in...certain circumstances. And I imagine the symbolism of such a thing isn't lost on Ai, given the art design of his 'A.I. Love Fusion' card, and the fact that he goes out of his way to design the Fusion monster that represents Earth with a blue 'crystal' heart on it as what I'm guessing is an ode to Earth's canonical feelings towards Aqua.

I certainly can't see Ai proposing fusion with any human other than Yusaku.

**Edit:** AHAHAHAHAHAHA. I have just watched the final episode and I cannot believe that my brief paragraph on the whole 'Yusaku gets shot and killed trying to protect Ai in the simulations' scenario ended up being canon, more or less. Was not expecting that.


End file.
